Poetry is a way of living, I think.It's a human activity like baking bread or playing basketball. At least I think it should be. . It ought to have that quality. What ought to distinguished it in that way is craftsmanship which is not distancing, though it does throw your attention off yourself and onto the work to be done."
Robert Hass. Interview by David Remnick in
The Chicago Review (Spring 1981)
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"Poetry is the Journal of a sea animal
living on land, waiting to fly in the air."
Carl Sandburg
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JOHN KEATS AS SURGEON
John Keats " ... studied medicine and was trained in surgery for as many years as he wrote poetry. Even people who know of Keats's early training have assumed that he was pushed into medicine against his will, resented it and left it as soon as possible. Not so, according to Robert Gittings, an English bigrapher of Keats. The poet picked a medical career on his own, worked hard at a sound training program and did well, and had actually qualified as a general practioner when he gave up medicine to devote the rest of his life (four years, as it turned out) to the joys and pain of writing."
50,100, & 150 Years Ago: innovation and discovery as chronicled in Scientific American, compiled by Mark Fischetti, Scientific American (June 2023)
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U.S. PRESIDENTS WHO WROTE POETRY
On May 18, 2023, Nick Ripatrazone in The Literary Hub published a wOnderful column on on the Poetic Aspirations of American Presidents--"Who Was the only sitting President to contribute to a lterary journal." He wrote:
"Adams had regularly published in Port Folio, a Philadelphia-based journal of politics and literature, from 1801 to 1812. Like other contributors, his work was unsigned, but reveals a lifelong devotion to poetry. In fact, Adams’s stated goal was “to excite a taste for poetry.” He translated Juvenal for the magazine. He wrote critical essays, book reviews, and politically minded poems.
"Adams is not the only president who wrote poetry. Abraham Lincoln’s poetry once appeared in an Illinois newspaper. Jimmy Carter’s collection of poetry, Always a Reckoning, was published in 1995. .... Barack Obama’s poems appeared in his undergraduate literary magazine, Feast, and were good enough to later receive praise from Harold Bloom."
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THINKING ABOUT THIS POEM
Reading this poem
Will make you more intelligent,
But just think
What not reading this poem
Can do for you.
**
DOROTHY SAYERS, NOT DOROTHY PARKER, PENNED
THE FOLLOWING LIGHT VERSE
THAT’S WHY I DO NOT READ MODERN NOVELS
As I grow older and older,
And totter towards the tomb,
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom.
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ROBERT BURNS & AULD LANG SYNE
“Some music historians call “Auld Lang Syne” “the song nobody knows,” though that doesn’t stop people from trying to sing it each year. The title is often interpreted as “times long past” or “days gone by,” but its literal translation from the Scots language is “old long since.” The melody was first paired with lyrics by Scottish poet Robert Burns in 1788, after he heard someone sing the traditional tune.
Source: Readers Digesr
https://www.historyquiz.com/quiz/61b93a99db8e6c00070b7012?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=639d39589c2e11f91de973b9
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POETS HAVE ALL KINDS OF LIVE JUST
"English literary history provides few opportunities for generalization. In fact, on the basis of the past two or three centuries, there may be only one maxim that can be ventured with confidence: poets have bad lives. High rates of fatal illness (tuberculosis, typhoid), suicide, death by misadventure (drowning, brawling, buggy accidents, falling from bar stools) and alcoholism ensure that many are short. When they are longer – and they are almost never very long – other problems present themselves. Milton’s blindness. Pound’s treason and imprisonment."
Hannah Sullivan "Frozen Love"in TLS (March 3, 2023)
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HENRY DAVID THOREAU ON WILLIAM WORDSMITH
"To judge from a single conversations, he made the impression of a narrow and very English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity. Off his own beat, his opinions were of no value."
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ROBERT FROST REDUX
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
One more state project screw-up.
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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Just for a handful of silver he left us.
Just for a riband to stick in his coat.
Robert Browning
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THE HANDWRITING OF PERCY BISSHE SHELLEY
"Shelley's handwriting, wrote his friend Trelawny, 'might have been taken for a sketch of a marsh overgrown with bullrushes, and the blots for wild ducks.'"
Mark Doty. The Art of Description (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2010)
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THE PRIZE-WINNING POET MARIANNE MOORE COMES UP WITH NAMES FOR A NEW CAR TO BE MANUFACTURED BY THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY, or WOULD
YOU BE COMFORTABLE DRIVING A PASTELOGRAM?
In 1955, the Ford Company contacted the prize-winning poet Marianne Moore and asked if she would be interested in coming up with a name for a forthcoming new automobile. Ms. Moore agreed. Here are some of her suggestions:
1. The Ford Silver Sword
2. Hirundo
3. Aerundo
4. Hurricane Hirundo (swallow)
5. Hurricane Aquila (eagle)
6. Hurricane Accipter (hawk)
7. The Impeccable
8. Symmechromatic
9. Thunderblender
10. The Resilient Bullet
11. Intelligent Bullet
12. Bullet Cloisoné
13. Bullet Lavolta
14. The Intelligent Whale
15. The Ford Fabergé (That there is also a perfume Fabergé seems to me to do no harm, for here allusion is to the original silversmith)
16. The Arc-en-Ciel (the rainbow)
17. Arcenciel
18. Mongoose Civique
19. Anticipator
20. Regna Racer (couronne a couronne) sovereign to sovereign
21. Aeroterre
22. Fée Rapide (Aerofee, Aero Faire, Fee Aiglette, Magi-faire) Comme Il Faire
23. Tonnere Alifère (winged thunder)
24. Aliforme Alifère (wing-slender a-wing)
25. Turbotorc (used as an adjective by Plymouth)
26. Thunderbird Allié (Cousin Thunderbird)
27. Thunder Crester
28. Dearborn Diamanté
29. Magigravure
30. Pastelogram
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ON TAKING THE FINAL EXAMINATION
FOR MY INTRODUCTION TO POETRY CLASS
So much depends
Upon
My understanding
Of
Some stupid wheel
Barrow
Before my eyes
Glazed
With boredom
Turn
My attention
To
The sexy
chicks.
Louis Phillips
PhillipsMiscellany 